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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

If you store your VMware bits on external SAN or NAS-based disk storage systems, this post is for you. The subject of the post, VM Volumes, is a potential storage management game changer!

Fellow blogger Stephen Foskett mentioned VM Volumes in his [Introducing VMware vSphere Storage Features] presentation at IBM Edge 2012 conference. His session on VMware's storage features included VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), VMware Array Storage Awareness (VASA), vCenter plug-ins, and a new concept he called "vVol", now more formally known as VM Volumes. This post provides a follow-up to this, describing the VM Volumes concepts, architecture, and value proposition.

"VM Volumes" is a future architecture that VMware is developing in collaboration with IBM and other major storage system vendors. So far, very little information about VM Volumes has been released. At VMworld 2012 Barcelona, VMware highlights VM Volumes for the first time and IBM demonstrates VM Volumes with the IBM XIV Storage System (more about this demo below). VM Volumes is worth your attention -- when it becomes generally available, everyone using storage arrays will have to reconsider their storage management practices in a VMware environment -- no exaggeration!

But enough drama. What is this all about?

(Note: for the sake of clarity, this post refers to block storage only. However, the VM Volumes feature applies to NAS systems as well. Special thanks to Yossi Siles and the XIV development team for their help on this post!)

The VM Volumes concept is simple: VM disks are mapped directly to special volumes on a storage array system, as opposed to storing VMDK files on a vSphere datastore.

The following images illustrate the differences between the two storage management paradigms.

You may still be asking yourself: bottom line, how will I benefit from VM Volumes?

Well, take a VM snapshot for example. With VM Volumes, vSphere can simply offload the operation by invoking a hardware snapshot of the hardware volume. This has significant implications:

VM-Granularity: Only the right VMs are copied (with datastores, backing up or cloning individual-VM portions of hardware snapshot of a datastore would require more complex configuration, tools and work)

Hardware Offload: No ESXi server resources are consumed

XIV advantage: With XIV, snapshots consume no space upfront and are completed instantly.

Here's the first takeaway: With VM Volumes, advanced storage services (which cost a lot when you buy a storage array), will become available at an individual VM level. In a cloud world, this means that applications can be provisioned easily with advanced storage services, such as snapshots and mirroring.

Now, let's take a closer look at another relevant scenario where VM Volumes will make a lot of difference - provisioning an application with special mirroring requirements:

VM Volumes case: The application is ordered via the private cloud portal. The requestor checks a box requesting an asynchronous mirror. He changes the default RPO for his needs. When the request is submitted, the process wraps up automatically: Volumes are created on one of the storage arrays, configured with a mirror and RPO exactly as specified. A few minutes later, the requestor receives an automatic mail pointing to the application virtual machine.

Datastores case #1: As may be expected, a datastore that is mirrored with the special RPO does not exist. As a result, the automated workflow sets a pending status on the request, creates an urgent ticket to a VMware administrator and aborts. When the VMware admin handles that ticket, she re-assigns the ticket to the storage administrator, asking for a new volume which is mirrored with the special RPO, and mapped to the right ESXi cluster. The next day, the volume is created; the ticket is re-assigned to the storage admin, with the new LUN being pointed to. The VMware administrator follows and creates the datastore on top of it. Since the automated workflow was aborted, the admin re-assigns the ticket to the cloud administrator, who sometime later completes the application provisioning manually.

Datastores case #2: Luckily for the requestor, a datastore that is mirrored with the special RPO does exist. However, that particular datastore is consuming space from a high performance XIV Gen3 system with SSD caching, while the application does not require that level of performance, so the workflow requires a storage administrator approval. The approval is given to save time, but the storage administrator opens a ticket for himself to create a new volume on another array, as well as a follow-up ticket for the VMware admin to create a new datastore using the new volume and migrate the application to the other datastore. In this case, provisioning was relatively rapid, but required manual follow up, involving the two administrators.

Here's the second takeaway: With VM Volumes, management is simplified, and end-to-end automation is much more applicable. The reason is that there are no datastores. Datastores physically group VMs that may otherwise be totally unrelated, and require close coordination between storage and VMware administrators.

Now, the above mainly focuses on the VMware or cloud administrator perspective. How does VM Volumes impact storage management?

VM's are the new hosts: Today, storage administrators have visibility of physical hosts in their management environment. In a non-virtualized environment, this visibility is very helpful. The storage administrator knows exactly which applications in a data center are storage-provisioned or affected by storage management operations because the applications are running on well-known hosts. However, in virtualized environments the association of an application to a physical host is temporary. To keep at least the same level of visibility as in physical environments, VMs should become part of the storage management environment, like hosts. Hosts are still interesting, for example to manage physical storage mapping, but without VM visibility, storage administrators will know less about their operation than they are used to, or need to. VM Volumes enables such visibility, because volumes are provided to individual VMs. The XIV VM Volumes demonstration at VMworld Barcelona, although experimental, shows a view of VM volumes, in XIV's management GUI.

Here's a screenshot:

That's not all!

Storage Profiles and Storage Containers: A Storage Profile is a vSphere specification of a set of storage services. A storage profile can include properties like thin or thick provisioning, mirroring definition, snapshot policy, minimum IOPS, etc.

Storage administrators define a portfolio of supported storage services, maintained as a set of storage profiles, and published (via VASA integration) to vSphere.

VMware or cloud administrators define the required storage profiles for specific applications
VMware and storage administrators need to coordinate the typical storage requirements and the automatically-available storage services. When a request to provision an application is made, the associated storage profiles are matched against the published set of available storage profiles. The matching published profiles will be used to create volumes, which will be bound to the application VMs. All that will happen automatically.

Note that when a VM is created today, a datastore must be specified. With VM Volumes, a new management entity called Storage Container (also known as Capacity Pool) replaces the use of datastore as a management object. Each Storage Container exposes a subset of the available storage profiles, as appropriate. The storage container also has a capacity quota.

Here are some more takeaways:

New way to interface vSphere and storage management: Storage administrators structure and publish storage services to vSphere via storage profiles and storage containers.

Automated provisioning, out of the box: The provisioning process automatically matches application-required storage profiles against storage profiles available from the specified storage containers. There is no need to build custom scripts and custom processes to automate storage provisioning to applications

The XIV advantage:

XIV services are very simple to define and publish. The typical number of available storage profiles would be low. It would also be easy to define application storage profiles.

XIV provides consistent high performance, up to very high capacity utilization levels, without any maintenance. As a result, automated provisioning (which inherently implies less human attention) will not create an elevated risk of reduced performance.

Note: A storage vendor VASA provider is required to support VM Volumes, storage profiles, storage containers and automated provisioning. The IBM Storage VASA provider runs as a standalone service that needs to be deployed on a server.

Until you can get your hands on a VM Volumes-capable environment, the VMware and IBM developer groups will be collaborating and working hard to realize this game-changing feature. The above information is definitely expected to trigger your questions or comments, and our development teams are eager to learn from them and respond. Enter your comments below, and I will try to answer them, and help shape the next post on this subject. There's much more to be told.

I worked with the IBM Redbooks residency team to review this paper and ensure it had the right focus. I did not want a Redpaper that just listed all of the IBM technologies available, but rather spend some effort on the business benefits, and realistic use cases with actual client examples, that help illustrate not just what a Smart Storage Cloud is, but why your business may benefit from having one, and how others have already benefited from their deployment.

To help promote this new Redpaper, my colleagues Larry Coyne and Karen Orlando filmed me talking about the book. This has been posted as a [4-minute YouTube video]. This is the first time we have promoted a Redpaper using a video, so let me know what you thinkk in the comment section below.

In this [InformationWeek webcast], my IBM colleague Allen Marin will present a brief overview of IBM Smarter Storage for the enterprise with a focus on new high-end disk and Virtual Tape solutions.

Allen will take you through the recent enhancements [announced earlier this month], highlighting how the new capabilities can address the requirements of your mission-critical applications, as well as your evolving business analytics, and cloud initiatives.

Businesses of all sizes are getting buried in the avalanche of data. Data is coming in at faster rates and in greater volumes. The value of data is increasing. Old processes and technologies aren't working. Midsize businesses have the same issues managing the rapid growth of data as large enterprises, but they don't have the same size budget or staff. They need advanced capabilities at an affordable price that are easy to implement.

Speakers for this webcast include Brian Truskowski, General Manager, IBM System Storage and Networking; Ed Walsh, Vice President of Market and Strategy, IBM System Storage; and Tommy Rickard, IBM Director, UK Storage Development.

Well it's Tuesday, and you know what that means! IBM Announcements! Actually, it is Wednesday, but I started writing this post yesterday, and had to do some additional research to finish.

This week, IBM introduced the newest member of the PureSystems family of expert integrated systems - IBM PureData System. The new systems are designed to help clients effectively harness the massive volume, variety and velocity of information being created every day. The result? They deliver critical insights to improve business results.

The new systems are available in three different models, each optimized specifically for different workloads.

PureData System for Transactions. Optimized for transactional processing workloads such as e-commerce and built to handle large volumes of transactions with flexibility, availability, scalability and integrity. Basically, this is IBM DB2 pureScale and InfoSphere Optim features running on Linux-x86 nodes. The system comes in small, medium and large tee-shirt sizes, and can support over 100 databases. If you have DB2 applications, these can work with PureData unchanged. If your applications are based on Oracle databases, these can work with minimal changes to use PureData systems.

PureData System for Analytics. Powered by Netezza technology, this data warehouse system features built-in database analytics to quickly explore and analyze large amounts of sturctured information. This is the beefed-up version of the Netezza TwinFin 1000. IBM DB2® Analytics Accelerator for z/OS® V3.1 (IDAA) supports both the new IBM PureData System for Analytics N1001 and existing IBM Netezza 1000 systems as accelerators.

PureData System for Operational Analytics. Capable of delivering actionable insights concurrently to more than 1,000 business operations, supporting real-time decision making for businesses. This is the follow-on product to the IBM Smart Analytics System 7700 based on POWER7 nodes. This uses IBM Storwize V7000 disk systems inside.

PureData System joins the PureSystems family which also includes the PureFlex System and PureApplication System, [both announced last April]. PureSystems provide built-in expertise, integration by design and simplification through the system lifecyle, helping businesses reduce complexity, accelerate value and improve IT economics.

In a related announcement, Andy Monshaw was recently named IBM General Manager, PureFlex. Some of you readers may remember that Andy Monshaw was previously the General Manager for IBM System Storage several years ago, and was my second line manager, and I am glad to welcome him back!

A lot was announced this week, so I decided to break it up into several separate posts. This is part 3 in my 3-part series, focusing on our Tivoli Storage products.
To read the rest of the series, see:

The latest release of FlashCopy Manager now supports NetApp and IBM N series storage devices. This provides application-aware snapshots, coordinated with applications like SAP, DB2 and Oracle.

FlashCopy Manager now integrates with Metro and Global Mirror capabilities, so that application-consistent copies are available at remote sites for disaster recovery, or to off-load the FlashCopy destination copy from disk to Tivoli Storage Manager storage pools.

Tivoli Storage Manager v6.4

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is part of IBM's Unifed Recovery Management. Here are some highlights:

TSM for ERP. I remember when these were called "Tivoli Data Protection" modules. We still refer to them as "TDPs". The TSM for ERP provides backup capability for SAP environments, and this latest release adds support for in-memory SAP HANA databases.

TSM for Virtualization Environments IBM TSM is famous for its patented "Progressive Incremental Backup" which is far more efficient than full+incrementals or full+differentials. IBM now extends this method to VM images. With people consolidating more and more VMs onto fewer host servers, TSM-VE now offers multiple backup streams in parallel. TSM-VE can now take application-aware backups of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory running in VMs. TSM-VE will also support vApp and VM templates. If it takes you [a day and a half to build a VMware template], you would want to make sure all that work was backed up, right?

A lot was announced yesterday, so I decided to break it up into several separate posts. This is part 2 in my 3-part series, focusing on: Storwize V7000 Unified, LTO-6 tape, and the SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center.

The Storwize V7000 Unified is a product that consists of a 2U-high Storwize V7000 control enclosure that provides block-based access, combined with two 2U-high File Modules that provide file-based NAS protocols: CIFS, NFS, HTTPS, SCP and FTP. The problem was that when it was introduced, it was based on Storwize V7000 v6.3, so when the Storwize V7000 v6.4 features were announced last June, they did not apply to the Storwize V7000 Unified.

That is all fixed now, so the Storwize V7000 Unified now supports the full v6.4 features, including Real-time Compression for both file and block-based access to primary data, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for block access.

The two File Modules are no longer limited to a single Storwize V7000 control enclosure, you can now connect to up to four control enclosures clustered together. Combined with up to nine expansion enclosures for additional disk raises the total maximum to 960 drives.

If you don't already have an Active Directory or LDAP server, the Storwize V7000 Unified now offers an embedded LDAP server, for smaller deployments that want to reduce the number of servers they need to purchase for a complete solution.

Like the [IBM XIV Gen3 storage system], both the Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified now also support the OpenStack Nova-volume interface.

Lastly, if you have a Storwize V7000 v6.4, you can upgrade it to a Storwize V7000 Unified by simply adding the two File Modules. This can be done in the field.

IBM LTO-6 for tape libraries and drives

IBM introduces the sixth generation of Linear Tape Open (LTO-6) drives, which can be used as stand-alone IBM TS1060 drives, or in IBM tape libraries. As with previous models of LTO, the LTO-6 can read two older generations (LTO-4 and LTO-5) tape media, and can write to previous generation (LTO-5) tape media. You can buy the LTO-6 drives now, and use the older media until LTO-6 tape cartridges are available (hopefully later this year!)

My friend, Brad Johns, from Brad Johns Consulting, has a great post on this [LTO-6 Announcement]. While you expect the new drives to be faster with a denser tape media format, the key advantage to the LTO-6 is that it improves the compression algorithm, from the previous 2:1 to the new 2.5:1 compression ratio:

Level

Uncompressed

Compressed

LTO-5

1.5TB

140 MB/sec

3.00TB

280 MB/sec

LTO-6

2.5TB

160 MB/sec

6.25TB

400 MB/sec

Thus, with the improved compression, the LTO-6 is 40 percent faster, with double the tape cartridge density. This can reduce backup times by 30 percent, increase the amount of data that sits in your automated tape libraries, and reduce the courier costs sending tapes off-site.

IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center v5.1

Last year, IBM coined the phrase "Storage Hypervisor" to refer to the underlying technology in the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Storwize V7000 disk systems.

At the IBM Edge conference last June, my colleague Mike Griese presented [SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center]. Back then, it was a pilot program (beta test), and this week, IBM announces that it will be formally available as a product.

The idea was simple: take the basic storage hypervisor, and add the necessary software to make it a complete solution.

If all of your disk is currently virtualized behind IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), or you want to put all of your data behind SVC, then SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center is for you. Basically, for one per-TB price, you get all of the following:

The software features of SAN Volume Controller v6.4, including FlashCopy, Metro Mirror and Global Mirror.

The full advanced features of IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v5.1, including the Storage Analytics Engine that does "Right-Tiering", recommending which LUNs should be moved entirely from one disk system to another, based on policies and access patterns.

IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager v3.2 which manages FlashCopy with full coordination with applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, SAP, and VMware. This ensures that the FlashCopy destination copies are clean, eliminating the need to run backout or redo logs to correct any incomplete units of work.

If this combination sounds familiar, it was based on IBM's previous attempt called [Rapid Application Storage] which combined the Storwize V7000 with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Midrange Edition and FlashCopy Manager.

The key difference is that SmartCloud VSC does not include the SVC hardware itself, you buy this separately. If you want Real-time Compression, that is charged separately for the subset of TB of the volumes that you select for compression.

Well it's Wednesday, and you know what that means... IBM Announcements.

(Normally, announcements are on Tuesdays, but we moved this one over to Wednesday to line up with our big launch event in Pinehurst, NC. )

A lot was announced today, so I decided to break it up into several separate posts. I will start with our Enterprise Systems: DS8870, TS7700 Release 3, and XIV Gen3.

Enterprise systems are the servers, storage and software at the core of an enterprise IT infrastructure. Enterprise systems enable a private cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale, with flexible service delivery models that provide dynamic efficiency for resource and workload management. They make sure critical data is always available across the enterprise, making it accessible in new ways so that actionable insights can be derived from advanced and operational analytics. They also provide ultimate security, ensuring the integrity of critical data while mitigating risk and providing assured compliance.

IBM System Storage DS8870® disk system

This new storage system is the next generation in IBM's DS8000 series, based on IBM's POWER7 chipset. Each CEC can have 2, 4, 8 or 16 cores. Like the DS8800, you can have a mix of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch disk drives of different speeds and capacities, up to 1,536 drives in a four-frame configuration. The maximum cache is now 1TB usable. The combination of faster chipset and more cache can triple performance for some workloads!

All DS8870s ship standard with all Full Disk Encryption (FDE-capable) drives. The problem in the past was that people would buy DS8000 with non-FDE drives, and then later want to activate encryption, and discovered that they have to swap out their drives with those with the encryption chip built in. Now, all drives on the DS8870 will have the encryption chip. This also allows Easy Tier sub-volume automated tiering to move encrypted data between all media types.
Flash optimization with DS8000 Easy Tier can improve performance up to 3 times with 3% of data on solid-state storage. Easy Tier is easy to deploy and runs automatically.

Support of the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) T10 Data Integrity Field (DIF) standard. This is a feature that the mainframe has had for years, and is now being extended to distributed operating systems. The concept is simple. When sending data between server and storage, generate a checksum at the source, and then validate the checksum at the target. When you write a block of data, the server generates the checksum, and the DS8870 validates the checksum on arrival. When you read the data back, the DS8870 generates the checksum, and the server validates it on arrival. This ensures that data was not corrupted in between. There is a great write-up on IBM developerWorks: [End-to-end data protection using T10 standard data integrity field].

Energy Efficient. The DS8870 consumes less energy than its predecessor, the DS8800. For example, a fully-configured four-frame DS8870 with 1,536 disk drives consumes only 23.2kW, compared to the same number of drives in a DS8800 consumed 26.3 kW. By comparison, the DS8700 with five frames and 1,024 drives consumed 29.2kW.

Support for new System z load balancing algorithm. System z Workload Manager now interacts with the DS8870 I/O Priority Manager to optimize designated Quality of Service (QoS) levels. We have also the fastest operational analytics solution with DB2 list Prefetch cache optimization with DS8870 High Performance FICON (zHPF) integration. This solution increases DB2 query performance up to 11 times with disk, and up to 60 times with solid-state drives (SSD). File scans are up to 30 percent faster using DS8870 zHPF support for sequential access methods (QSAM, BPAM, and BSAM).

VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support. Why should the IBM DS8800 series support VMware when IBM already offers great VMware support with SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize V7000 and XIV storage sytsems? Good question. This was hotly debated between development and marketing. Several DS8000 customers have already added SVC to provide full VMware VAAI support. As a consultant, I am neither development nor marketing, but felt it necessary to weigh in on my opinion on this. The DS8000 is a consolidation platform. According to one analyst survey, 22 percent of companies run on a single disk platform, so for DS8000 to be the one, it needs to support VMware and exploit these special APIs.

Six Nines Availability. Critical enterprise systems need to deliver continuous data availability, or very close to it. IBM solutions can help deliver up to six “nines” of availability, or 99.9999 percent when combining DS8000 Metro Mirror and GDPS Hyperswap. That's less than 30 seconds of downtime per year.

The TS7700 Release 3 represents a refresh to our existing virtual tape libraries. These are mainframe-only, offered in two models: TS7720 is a disk-only device, and the TS7740 is a blended disk-and-tape solution.

Industry standard hardware encryption. This applies to user data stored on the TS7700 system cache (disk), and for data transferred between TS7700 systems. This is especially important for regulations, like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). In previous models, the data would not be encrypted until it was moved off disk and written to tape. Now, it is encrypted the minute in lands on the disk cache, and stays encrypted as it is replicated from one TS7700 to another in the grid.

Up to 4 Million logical volume capacity. This is twice the previous support.

More physical capacity for TS7720 systems. The maximum capacity for the disk-only model is raised from 440TB to 620TB, representing a 40 percent increase.

I have published my fifth volume in my "Inside System Storage" series! Currently, it is only available in Paperback. My editor, Susan Pollard, is hoping to have the eBook and Hardcover versions ready for Cyber Monday. The foreword was written by my Dr. Sondra Ashmore.

You can order this, and all my other books, in all formats, directly from my [Author Spotlight] page. The paperback will also be available soon from other online booksellers, search for ISBN 978-1-300-26223-7.

Improved Scalability. A new Multi-system Manager (MSM) server reduces the operational complexity for large and multi-site XIV deployments. Previously, admins connected directly to XIV boxes. If you had 10 admins logged in, then every XIV box was managing 10 admin conversations. The new MSM acts as a go-between. The admins connect to the MSM, and the MSM connects to the XIV boxes. The MSM polls and caches the status of each XIV, greatly increasing the number of XIV boxes that an admin can manage.

Enhanced User Interface. A new Multi-system Manager server reduces the operational complexity for large and multi-site XIV deployments. We also added support for IPsec and US. Government (USGv6) certification for admistering the XIV over IPv6 networks. The XIV Mobile Dashboard app for iPhone and iPad is spiffed up. Finally, the GUI has been internationalized and translated to the Japanese language.

Enhanced Integration for Cloud. For OpenStack, XIV now offers a Nova-volume driver which provides persistent storage to OpenStack compute nodes. The Nova task force is now looking to move storage into its own project called Cinder. For VMware, XIV has full support for Site Recovery Manager (SRM) v4.1 and v5.0 releases. XIV now also supports the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which can manage Hyper-V, VMware and Citrix XenServer hypervisors.

Smaller entry point. The original XIV supported 1TB and 2TB drives, with the smallest offering being 27TB usable. When IBM introduced the XIV Gen3, the two choices were 2TB and 3TB disk drives. Unfortunately, this meant that the initial entry model was now 55TB in size, and each additional module would be more expensive as well. IBM is now going to offer 1TB support for XIV Gen3 for a lower price point, these are actually 2TB drives with half the capacity turned off.

The job is located in Tucson, Arizona, which is a great place to live! Tucson is the headquarters for IBM storage design and development, with the largest collection of engineers, software developers and testers. The IBM Tucson Executive Briefing Center is located on the [University of Arizona Science and Technology Park] campus that houses over 7,000 employees from 50 different companies.

What does the job entail?

Primarily, you will be developing, customizing and presenting Powerpoint presentations and live product demos. For some briefings, you will work with sales reps, IBM Business Partners, and clients to develop an agenda of topics to discuss. At times, the presentation may involve working to solve the client's problems, drawing on the whiteboard or flip charts to help capture the requirements and architect a solution.

Most of the presentations will be performed in Tucson, either in person, by webcast or video conference call. Sometimes, this includes discussions over drinks, dinner or golfing. Occasionally, there will be travel to present at client locations, IBM branch offices, events or conferences. My manager estimates approximately 10 percent travel.

Is the pay based on a commission?

Absolutely not! We are consultants, not salespeople. To maintain our "trusted advisor" status, it is a flat salary, with possibility for year-end bonus based on how well our division does overall. This allows us to present and position all of the products fairly to the clients at briefings without bias. Our clients appreciate that! The job is considered pre-sales technical support.

Is training included?

Yes. Assuming you already have a strong background in storage hardware and software, and how these connect to SAN and LAN networks for a variety of operating systems like z/OS, AIX, Windows and Linux, there will be training for the latest updates and features of the IBM products throughout the year. Also, there will be professional training to build up your public speaking and meeting facilitation skills.

How do I apply?

If you are an American citizen, fluent in the English language, and have at least a Bachelor's Degree, go to the [IBM Employment website], look for "Storage Support Specialist" position using job code "STG-0524037" or "STG-0525309". IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.